PARTICIPATORY ART — Come wash with us: Seeking home in story “Tasht Collective”

April 29, 2018 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

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Come wash with us: Seeking home in story is a collaborative research-creation piece by a collective of four women. The members of our collective originally come from the Middle/Near East. Having lived in a volatile region before calling Canada home, all four of us have inherited memories of atrocities from our families, just as we have lived ourselves through civil wars, military coups, bloody revolutions and political repressions. It is these inherited and lived difficult memories that also have become the fabric of both our individual work in our respective disciplines and the broader canvas of our projected collective work.

Our starting point is our personal stories and family memories of doing laundry, which woven together with shared history from our originary communities become the springboard for creating our own community sitting around a circle of washtubs to explore our collective stories of loss, dispossession, war, genocide, and exile. The performance (approximately one hour in length), features an open dialogue amongst ourselves and with viewers who would like to join our process of washing. By carrying the conversations into the space of “doing laundry” communally we hope to break down barriers between “audience” and “artist,” and create an alternative methodological language in which the process becomes the performance.